I’ve been waiting for this, and even though I still don’t have my paper, in-the-hand catalogue…hooray! my quilt, Annularity, has hit print. This is a screenshot of the digital catalogue.

The direct link to this page in the Fall Keepsake Quilting catalogue will allow you to order yourself a kit, if you like. I’ve made two of these…now it is your turn to play with color and with the cool Painter’s Palette Solids. (Or, if you want, you can just order the pattern.) Thanks, Keepsake!

I use Magnifico thread as it has a nice sheen without being shiny, and it lays down a lovely line of stitching. In the bobbin is So Fine thread (both by Superior Threads).

I made a duplicate of Annularity II — which was a quilt I designed and made for Paintbrush Studios (which hung at QuiltCon, and most recently, Quilt Market) — because I thought the first version had been lost in the mail en route to the quilter. It hadn’t, and now I had my own top.

Then I decided to quilt my own, trying out different ideas as explained in an earlier post. But thanks to my quilt holder Dave, I can now reveal the fully quilted version to the world, as well as deliver some great news about this quilt.

Recently I’d been talking with Rick and Dot Kimmelman of Pineapple Fabrics about this quilt, hoping they’d want to use it for their booth, as they carry the full line of Painter’s Palette Fabrics. In between Point A and Point B of our discussions, they purchased Keepsake Quilting, which made many of us in the QuiltWorld very happy. And so, beginning this summer, Keepsake Quilting and Pineapple Fabrics will be the exclusive sellers of my Annularity pattern. Both Keepsake and Pineapple will also have kits available that include all the fabrics for the top and binding. (You can check Pineapple Fabrics.com to purchase within the next month, and see Keepsake Quilting’s Fall catalogue, due out the second week of August. You can bet I’ll put something up on here when I first lay eyes on my quilt in their catalogue!)

The wild and crazy back. It’s “prairie house” from the De Leon Design Group, for Alexander Henry Fabrics. I thought it might disguise any oopsies, but I was happy to note that I actually had very few. I guess maybe after ten years I’m getting better at the quilting? Much credit belongs to the Sweet Sixteen machine I use, and the threads, which always seem to balance so well.

After one quilting session, when I turned it over to check the back, I noticed I had quilted in this wedge-shaped scrap onto the back. I started to try and cut it out, then decided I kind of liked this nod to the process, so left it in. Really, you can’t see it, when looking at the overall back. (Well, NOW you do, but you didn’t at first, right?)

So, thanks for being my cheering squad, motivating me to finish up my quilt. And I hope you enjoy making yours!

My version of Annularity sat rolled up on my guest bed for ages, until I realized it wasn’t going to get quilted that way. There are no Quilting Fairies, not that I know of. (Shucks.)

Where does quilting begin? It begins in the tortured anguished cry of “How am I going to quilt this thing?” an endeavor I described in this blog post titled Don’t Let the Process Overtake the Purpose— a terrifying something about careening off a mountain cliff sort of feeling. Yep. That’s how it starts…or doesn’t. But finally, using some advice I’d been given at QuiltCon, I started drawing and drawing (above). It got me through the center.

Then the outer ring of colors. I opened any random artsy book in my house, pulling up the one from an exhibit of Japanese screens from the Smithsonian, which prompted those bold ribbon designs in the upper right, which looked to me like the ribbons at the end of a piñata.

No.

But that same book gave me the idea to think of those shapes as fans, and to fill in the design as if someone had opened one of those and was showing me the designs.

It became easier to visualize the design that way.

Am I 100% thrilled with this? No, but I am 100% happy that I’ve figured it out enough to get the quilt quilted, knowing — again — the truth in that old slogan I repeat to myself more than once a day: The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good. (or Done.)

I had purchased a number of spools of Superior Thread’s Magnifico, which is my go-to thread for quilting. It lays down a lovely, slightly thicker, line of thread, but it doesn’t sit on top of the quilt like some thicker threads. I’m always trying to match the thread well, taking photos of the colors to keep myself on target.

So I wouldn’t get discouraged over taking this in small bites, I took a photo at the end of each quilting session, threw it into my Snapseed app on my phone and labeled the date and the progress. Above is the first grouping.

It was celebration once I quilted out of the reds into the yellow, which you can see happened last week.

Here’s where I am now. I’ve got to take a break for a while (some traveling and family stuff), but look forward to getting back at it. The dark outer quadrants have already been planned, mostly quilted in black thread, letting them recede away from the rainbow of colors.

The story of this begins when I was contacted by the fine people at Paintbrush Studios, who make the ever-lovely Painter’s Palette Solids. I submitted one design for review, time passed, things changed; I thought the process was dead in the water.

But I had all these lovely fabrics, so we started the process again.

I played around in QuiltPro, my favorite quilt design program and came up with the above design messes.

I showed them to Simone, seeking advice, and she said, “Don’t forget the white.” Negative space is critical, but sometimes you get in the weeds of a thing and you can’t see your way clear.

Given that the Great American Eclipse was on my mind, I started calling my quilt Annularity:

I began building the quilt top, remembering the white. But when I got to the outer edges, something still wasn’t right. A designer can do all the designing they want to, but then the fabric takes over and slowly, the outer edges morphed from the planned design to what you see at the very top. Then there was the problem of the center.

I tried lots of combinations: yellow, aqua, violet, maroon but finally finished with periwinkle, one of my favorite colors in the Painter’s Palette Solids line-up. I finished it and when Paintbrush Studios told me that Natalia Bonner was going to quilt it, I was over the moon, because I quite admire her work. I bundled up the quilt, sent it off, and then waited. And waited. And waited. And I began to wonder, even though I’d tracked it to her address, if it had gotten lost. I worried, then did the next best thing:

I made another.

In the rush, I didn’t have all the correct fabrics, so some are pieced. But then I heard from Natalia that she had the quilt. Whew! Since it’s going to be hanging in the booth at QuiltCon 2018 in Pasadena, I gave the first one a new name, since now there were two in the world: Annularity II.

Pineapple Fabrics has the complete line of colors needed to make this design, and you can soon buy the quilt pattern from them. Come and see Annularity II in the Paintbrush Studios booth, #905.

But I’ll be quilting mine, Annularity, bit by bit, sharing that experience as I proceed. In the meantime, enjoy the photos of Natalia’s fine work:

Create

"The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing: it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills." ~Arthur Koestler